Read Online TREYF by Elissa Altman - Free Book Online

hanger aside: there’s the blue striped suit, the brown striped suit, the blue seersucker suit, the navy blazer, the camel’s hair blazer, the banker’s gray pants, the terrycloth robe, the riding jodhpurs, the Glen plaid hacking jacket, the powder blue leisure suit with the white buttons accidentally melted by Tess during an overzealous dry cleaning. He shoves everything back and starts all over again, like a shopper searching a rack for the right size. His ears are so red, they’re almost blue. I can hear my mother in the kitchen, opening the refrigerator door; I hear her pull the cork on a bottle of wine. From where I sit, I can see my father’s dingy white Jack Purcell’s, his brown loafers, his wingtips, his tan suede bucks, his riding boots, hisleather opera slippers lined up on the closet floor. A colorful cardboard box containing his electric race car set topples over from where it is leaning against the inside closet wall; the lid separates from the bottom and long sections of black plastic track fall out and into the entryway to the bedroom. He grabs them and heaves all but one back into the closet; that one he smashes against the wall, where it explodes into shards of extruded black plastic that fly everywhere.
    â€œWhere
is
it?” he yells. My mother is watching from the narrow hallway between their bedroom and mine, smoking a cigarette and sipping her wine from a blue glass goblet.
    â€œNot in front of her,” she says, calmly, nodding over to me on the bed.
    â€œWhere IS it?”
    â€œIt stank like a stable. I’ll get you a new one.” She draws a puff and the tip of her cigarette grows into a long, smoldering ash the length of a pencil eraser. I’m fixated on it; if it drops, I’m certain that it will set the wall-to-wall carpet on fire like on the television shows I watch, and we will burn and we will perish and the building will be a hollowed-out shell of brick, the blackened holes where windows used to be now empty and gaping like toothless sockets.
    My father slams the closet door, which jolts me out of my pyrophobic panic. He storms into the foyer, pulls out an ancient, hard-sided brown tweed Pullman suitcase, drags it past my mother and her cigarette back into the bedroom, and flings it open onto their bed right next to me; its leather handle grazes my leg. He empties a drawer’s worth of clothes into it, slams itshut, and stomps out into the hallway, grabs his car keys from the candy dish on the entryway table, and pulls the front door closed behind him so hard that the doorbell rings and the dog barks.
    It happens in thick, slow motion; I watch it like a movie, through a scrim, from a distance.
    The mother, heavily made up like a movie starlet, is talking to the small child lying on her parents’ bed. The mother’s mouth moves slowly. The child’s lips are parted; she’s barely breathing. She’s sweating a little; she’s shivering. Her color has gone sallow. She vomits all over her flannel pajamas, the powder blue ones with the tiny apples; there is Hawaiian Punch everywhere.
    â€œDon’t worry, honey,” the mother says to the child, taking her by the hand into the bathroom, where she sits her on the toilet and tenderly strips off her soaked and wretched pajamas. She washes her daughter’s face with a cool washcloth that’s lost its nap; it feels like cold sandpaper on the child’s face. “He’ll be back,” she says, while the child sits stunned, exhausted.
    â€œHe’ll be back,” the child whispers to herself.
    The child has heard the parent-had-to-leave fairy tale over and over again; she’s heard it over dinner and she’s heard it in the car and she’s heard it while being tucked in, sometimes instead of Dr. Seuss. Her father’s mother left the family when her father was three years old, but ultimately, she loved them and couldn’t stay away; she came back to